You can schedule a meeting with ChatGPT today, in the same chat where you wrote the agenda. Not by asking it to guess when six people are free, and not by pasting times into a spreadsheet afterwards. You connect your own ChatGPT or Claude to a scheduling tool once, and from then on you type the request the way you would say it out loud: poll these six people for a 60-minute review the week of November 23.
The setup takes a few minutes. The only jargon in it is the word connector, and that takes two sentences to explain.
What a connector is, in two sentences
"MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open-source standard for connecting AI applications to external systems." The protocol's own documentation offers a better image: "Think of MCP like a USB-C port for AI applications."
That is all a connector is: a standard plug. Using MCP, AI applications like Claude or ChatGPT can connect to data sources, tools and workflows, so your assistant stops telling you what to do about Thursday and does it in the tool instead.
Two things worth saying plainly before the setup. The AI is yours: your ChatGPT, your Claude, on your account. WhenNOT contains no AI of its own and never claims one. And nothing costs anything on our side: polls, booking pages, every calendar connection and the connector itself are free, with nothing to upgrade to.
What you need before you start
- A ChatGPT or Claude plan that allows custom connectors. On the Claude side the help center is specific: "Custom connectors using remote MCP are available on Claude, Cowork, and Claude Desktop for users on Free, Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans. Free users are limited to one custom connector."
- A WhenNOT account, because the connector acts as you. Free, and it is the same account as the web and the Android app.
- One URL:
https://whennot.com/api/mcp - On a Claude Team or Enterprise plan, an admin: "While anyone can build and host connectors using remote MCP, only Owners and Primary Owners can add them to Team plans". On a personal plan you add it yourself.
Add WhenNOT as a custom connector
In Claude the path is short:
- Go to Customize > Connectors.
- Click Add, hover over Custom, then select Web.
- "Enter a name for the connector. This is the name users see in the connectors list." Call it WhenNOT.
- Paste
https://whennot.com/api/mcpas the remote MCP server URL and continue. - "Review the authentication settings Claude detected, and change them if your server needs something different." The defaults are right for WhenNOT. Finish by clicking Add.
Then connect it. You land on a WhenNOT sign-in page, and after that a consent screen with one Allow and one Cancel. Press Allow once. There are no separate switches for polls and bookings: it is a single consent, and you can take it back later.
This is ordinary OAuth, not a password handover. "When you add a custom connector to Claude, you'll typically go through an OAuth authentication process to securely sign in to the application and grant specific permissions."
Last step, and the one people miss: turn it on in the conversation. Open the "+" menu in the chat, hover over Connectors, and "Enable the specific services you want Claude to use for that conversation by toggling them on."
In ChatGPT the menus are worded differently, but the two ingredients are identical: the same URL, added as a custom connector, on a plan that allows them. There is no separate WhenNOT app to install in either product. If you mostly work on a phone, note that installing connectors on mobile is currently in beta, and Claude Desktop and the web stay the primary path for custom connectors. Add it on a computer; use it anywhere afterwards.
The fourteen things it can then do
A connector hands the assistant a fixed list of tools. WhenNOT ships fourteen. In plain language, eight of them are about group polls:
- create_poll - start a poll from one sentence.
- open_poll - pull up a poll you already have, as a card in the chat.
- list_my_polls - everything on your account.
- answer_poll - cross out the days or times you cannot make.
- invite_to_poll - send the email invitations without leaving the chat.
- remind_poll_participants - nudge the people who have not answered.
- get_poll_results - the ranking, fewest conflicts first.
- finalize_poll - pick the winner and send everyone the invite.
Six are about booking pages: list_booking_pages, find_open_times, book_time, list_bookings, reschedule_booking and cancel_booking.
You do not type those names. You type English, and the assistant picks. What comes back is not a wall of text either: connectors can render "Inline cards: Compact components embedded in the conversation, showing summaries, confirmations, or quick actions." WhenNOT uses them to share a poll, answer one and show results inside the chat.
A worked example: six people, one 60-minute review
Type something like this:
Create a WhenNOT poll for a 60-minute design review with Ana, Tim, Priya, Marco and Lena, weekdays the week of November 23, between 09:00 and 17:00 Lisbon time.
You get a card with a shareable link. Here is the part that makes the answers usable: on WhenNOT people cross out the days or times they CAN'T make, and the poll ranks the windows with the fewest conflicts first. A maybe counts as half a conflict. Nobody crosses out for everyone else, and nobody has to find the one slot that works; they only mark what is already taken.
Answering needs no account and no connector of their own. Your five colleagues get a link, open it in any browser and cross out. Each person sees the times in their own time zone, which matters when half the group is in another country. If that is your life, the longer version is in scheduling across time zones.
Then, in the same chat: who has not answered? The assistant reads the poll and can send a reminder. You can invite up to 50 people by email at once and share the job with up to 10 co-organisers.
Ask for results and you get the ranking. In our example, Monday November 23 at 15:00 is the only hour nobody crossed out, and four of six people crossed out Thursday November 26 and Friday November 27. Say "finalize it for Monday at 15:00" and everyone gets an email with the time, a calendar file and an Add to Google Calendar link.
If you would rather do all of that in a browser, it is the same product: create a free group poll and share the link. The chat is a shortcut, not a different tool. For the non-AI versions of the same job, see how to schedule a meeting with multiple people.
The other half: find a time and book it
The same connector reaches booking pages, not just polls. Ask "what is open on my booking page on Thursday afternoon" or "book Tim in for 30 minutes tomorrow morning" and the assistant uses find_open_times and book_time.
A booking page only offers hours you are genuinely free, because it checks "Google Calendar and Microsoft 365 / Outlook, as many accounts as you connect. Each one is checked before a time is offered." The booking is written to your calendar with an invite for the guest, and "A Google Workspace calendar adds a Google Meet link and a Microsoft 365 work or school calendar adds a Teams link." On a personal Gmail or Outlook.com calendar the invite goes out without a video link, so do not promise one.
Guests stay out of all of this: "Guests book from the link in any browser and get a confirmation with a reschedule and cancel link." And when you are the one who cannot make it, the assistant cannot shove the meeting somewhere else. It sends a reschedule request with up to five proposed times and the guest picks one. If you have not set a page up yet, start with a free booking page or read what a booking page is and when a poll beats one.
When it is worth scheduling a meeting with ChatGPT, and when it isn't
It is worth it when the scheduling is already happening in the chat: you are drafting the agenda, summarising a thread, or working through a list of people to talk to. Saying "poll them for the week of the 23rd" beats opening a tab.
It is not worth it for one meeting with one person who is sitting next to you. And it is not worth setting up on a phone, mid-week, five minutes before you need the poll. Add the connector on a quiet afternoon; use it for months.
Three things the vendor posts skip
WhenNOT is not in the connector directories yet. "You can find available connectors in the Connectors Directory, where each connector has a page detailing its use cases, read/write capabilities, and availability." WhenNOT is not listed there today, so you add it by URL as a custom connector. That is the normal route for a custom connector, not a workaround, but it does mean you type the address yourself.
The assistant is the reader's own. No AI lives inside WhenNOT. Your ChatGPT or your Claude does the reading and the writing; WhenNOT supplies the polls, the calendars and the invites.
Watch the first few actions. The same advice applies to every connector you add: "Be aware of any actions Claude is taking and that they have no destructive or unintended effects." Owners on Team and Enterprise plans can go further and limit which actions a connected service can take across the organization. And you are never locked in: "You can revoke these permissions at any time by disconnecting the connector in Claude's settings or the third-party service's security settings."
FAQ
Does this let ChatGPT read my calendar? The connector reaches your WhenNOT polls and booking pages. Your booking page is the thing that reads calendars, and only the Google and Microsoft accounts you connected to WhenNOT yourself.
Do the other participants need ChatGPT or Claude? No. They get a link, cross out what they cannot make, and never make an account.
Where does the connection come from? Not your laptop. "When you add a custom connector, Claude connects to your remote MCP server from Anthropic's cloud infrastructure, rather than from your local device." That matters for servers behind a company firewall. WhenNOT is on the public internet, so there is nothing to configure.
Does it cost anything? Not on the WhenNOT side. Polls, booking pages, calendar connections and the connector are free. What you need is a ChatGPT or Claude plan that allows custom connectors.
Set it up once
Add the connector, press Allow, then ask for the poll instead of starting the group chat. The setup and the exact URL are on the WhenNOT connectors page for ChatGPT and Claude.